| Photo by Jane Scherr |
Samantha Power Interview: Conversations with History: Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
| Photo by Jane Scherr |
Page 5 of 5
In your book, in your narrative, a very important role is taken on by individuals who combine smarts, idealism, perseverance, and a patience to work the system, to find surprising entry points. The Polish architect of the Genocide Convention [Raphael Lemkin] being one, Peter Galbraith being another, the senator from Wisconsin, William Proxmire, being another. Talk a little about some general pattern with regard to all of these individuals, and their contribution to this kind of national learning process.
This is the most important discovery, of the book: there are these upstanders. They are important not just because they actually did contribute to moving the ball just ever so slowly down the field over the course of the century. We did get a major military intervention in a sovereign state in 1999 or '98, in Kosovo; and we did see Milosevic [face trial] in the Hague; and a war crimes tribunal set up for a small country in Africa where 800,000 people had been killed. We did get a lot of things, and I think it's very much because of this refusal to be quashed and told that these things were just soft and irrelevant and just for people who had gone emotional or had gone native, or whatever. These are people who fought and fought.
So that's the outcome, and that's why they are so important. They also show us what was doable by proposing concretely certain policy measures -- not military intervention, or very rarely. Lemkin, of course, with the Genocide Convention. Bill Proxmire, you mentioned, just wanted to get U.S. ratification of that convention, and he gave 3,211 speeches on the Senate floor, one a day for nineteen years, a different speech a day, trying to get that ratification. Peter Galbraith tried to get economic sanctions imposed against Saddam so that we could cut off those farm perks that we were giving him.
What unites them, these amazing people whom I am so privileged to have come to know vicariously, and sometimes in person, is that they're a little antisocial. I don't know if there is a correlation that the person who is inclined to stand up in the herd when it's so overdetermined in the other direction is necessarily somebody who is going to be a little abrasive, a little monomaniacal, not very good at building coalitions; or if when they stand up, everybody else sort of melts away, and, thus, they look more antisocial than perhaps they are. But again and again, you see these people are so focused, they're not terribly attentive to the tactics of the moment, they're just on their cause. There's a savvyness to them and a relentlessness, but they do it at great professional cost to themselves -- as I mentioned earlier, they are marginalized by their colleagues -- and they do it at great personal cost as well, in that they become so consumed with it that the rest of the universe just melts away before this particular cause of stopping whatever the genocide du jour is.
You're an educator, and I'm curious as to what your reflections are on how we move the ball further down the field. You're a lawyer, you've been a journalist, you're something of an activist, I would assume, and you're a historian. How would you weigh the institutions that that these individual vocations fit in, as participating and raising everybody's consciousness on this issue? I know when you were a journalist in Bosnia you tried to get a story out before an atrocity, and your editor at the Washington Post was not responsive.
You raise a very important question: this is an all-systems failure. There's a society-wide silence, both in the face of genocide as it happens, and even abstractly -- the Holocaust Museum, which we talked about, being case in point. Again, it's not a genocide museum. It's a terrific institution, and I'm a great believer in it, and they're doing their best to make it contemporarily relevant with Sudan and Chechnya and some other places getting exhibits of their own. But we have to think about what are the disciplines that are being taught. How, for instance, is the Foreign Service Institute teaching diplomacy? Is any diplomat being trained to respond to genocide? How are our military academies treating Rwanda? Is it a civil war, about which there was no political will, and about which we could do nothing anyway, or are they actually looking operationally at all the different ways one might have gone in, so that if Burundi explodes, we could do things differently?
What about my college? I went to Yale College and majored in history, and the most moving experience so far in my book tour was going back to Yale, where a number of my faculty, my teachers, came out to be a part of the discussion about the book. And Gaddis Smith, who had been my advisor and a great inspiration to me, whom I've mentioned a couple of times, used the occasion to go back over his syllabi of the last fifty years. He just retired, and he's a diplomatic historian [who] taught U.S. foreign policy since 1945. And what he said in this incredibly moving, poignant presentation was, "I never mentioned genocide. For fifty years, I mentioned the Holocaust, but just as something that was happening during World War II, not as something that was relevant in the way that American foreign policy was made." It was like my experience with Morton Abramowitz, that somebody would look back and say, "Where was I? I look back, I tried to get Bosnia right, but Rwanda came and went, and I didn't pay the slightest bit of attention."
We all are telling ourselves stories in the moment that make it a little bit easier to go off in different directions. Our sense of what is the mainstream and what is academically legitimate to talk about, or institutionally legitimate to mobilize around, has usually excluded genocide. I think it's only with the work of Gourevitch and some other people in the 1990s [that] there is now a mainstream attentiveness to it, but not yet the capacity to turn that attentiveness into meaningful instruction, which I think is the next step. Hopefully, over the medium term anyway, [we will gain] the capacity to mobilize people when a crisis actually hits, because it's not enough to remember. [Otherwise] we'll just have another "never again" -- instead of maybe a "never again will the Germans kill Jews in Europe between 1939 and 1945," it will mean "never again will Hutu kill Tutsi in Rwanda between April and July of 1994."
We've got to build a way of connecting grassroots to grass tops, to elite centers of power. Whether [through] the academy, or specific members of Congress, targeting districts and so on, and being ready to mobilize discrete ethnic constituencies as well in this country, who might be more prone to say, "There but for the grace of God went I." There are a lot of ways in, but we don't yet have structures that know how to make noise when it matters.
Let me give you a thought experiment here, and it is the following: without addressing the Palestine - Israel problem, let's say you were an advisor to the President of the United States, how would you respond to current events there? Would you advise him to put a structure in place to monitor that situation, at least if one party or another [starts] looking like they might be moving toward genocide?
I don't think that in any of the cases, a shortage of information is the problem. I actually think in the Palestine - Israel situation, there's an abundance of information. What we don't need is some kind of early warning mechanism there, what we need is a willingness to put something on the line in helping the situation. Putting something on the line might mean alienating a domestic constituency of tremendous political and financial import; it may more crucially mean sacrificing -- or investing, I think, more than sacrificing -- billions of dollars, not in servicing Israel's military, but actually investing in the new state of Palestine, in investing the billions of dollars it would probably take, also, to support what will have to be a mammoth protection force, not of the old Rwanda kind, but a meaningful military presence. Because it seems to me at this stage (and this is true of actual genocides as well, and not just major human rights abuses, which were seen there), you have to go in as if you're serious, you have to put something on the line.
Unfortunately, imposition of a solution on unwilling parties is dreadful. It's a terrible thing to do, it's fundamentally undemocratic. But, sadly, we don't just have a democracy here either, we have a liberal democracy. There are certain sets of principles that guide our policy, or that are meant to, anyway. It's essential that some set of principles becomes the benchmark, rather than a deference to [leaders] who are fundamentally politically destined to destroy the lives of their own people. And by that I mean what Tom Freidman has called "Sharafat." I do think in that sense, both political leaders have been dreadfully irresponsible. And, unfortunately, it does require external intervention, which, very much like the Rwanda scenario, that thought experiment, if we had intervened early.... Any intervention is going to come under fierce criticism. But we have to think about lesser evils, especially when the human stakes are becoming ever more pronounced.
If students were watching this tape, how would you advise them to prepare for the future, if they want to be involved in this process of changing American foreign policy to respond in a more timely way to the potential threat of genocide?
I think that what you identified, the nexus of realism and idealism, is very important. Know how the system works. Unfortunately, it is the system we inherit. Whether it's the multilateral international institutions that we've discussed, or the domestic political arena, where we can't rest on slogans or information to get us political traction, ultimately, when the lives of citizens abroad are under siege, and mainstream concern about these issues [is lacking].... You don't have to go and join Human Rights Watch -- I'm all for it, but you don't have to go and join a human rights organization to be a human rights professional. Even if you go into business, you can be the person who drives your company into corporate social responsibility, and to caring about the rights of the workers, or thinking about the ways in which diamonds are used to fuel conflict, or whatever. There are all kinds of ways in which, once you've decided that you're going to stand on that side of the line, and that you're always going to be attentive to the human consequences of whatever your policies are.
The other thing I would just say, briefly, is that travel, and knowing a place well, can give you such insight, not only about why the human stakes do matter, but also about what might be done in service of prevention or suppression [of genocide], if it comes to that. It takes knowing the place to know the way out of that scene.
One final question. I want to go back to this interest in sports. What did you learn from that experience that you applied in this very different world that you're operating in?
Everything. Everything. I learned to fail, and I learned to keep getting up. Being an athlete myself, over time, [I learned] that the best baseball players get up 7 out of 10 times. And ultimately, you see these characters, these relentless characters in this book, and they will fail 9.9 times out of 10 times. And the question is in that: who are they converting, who are they convincing, who are they bringing along, who are they inspiring to take the same stand the next time around? So I think learning how to fail was a good lesson, and prepared me for a life in human rights.
Just seeing the possibility of mobilizing large numbers of people -- it doesn't take much. If you had just a little bit of leadership, I think that you could go a long way domestically.
On that note and hope for the future, Samantha, thank you very much for joining us today for this conversation on your new book.
Thank you.
And thank you very much for joining us for this Conversation with History.
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